MODERN HISTORY tells how the last four hundred years have
modified the medieval conditions of life and thought. In
comparison with them, the Middle Ages were the domain of
stability, and continuity, and instinctive evolution, seldom
interrupted by such originators as Gregory VII or St. Francis
of Assisi. Ignorant of History, they allowed themselves to be
governed by the unknown Past; ignorant of Science, they never
believed in hidden forces working onwards to a happier future.
The sense of decay was upon them; and each generation seemed
so inferior to the last, in ancient wisdom and ancestral virtue,
that they found comfort in the assurance that the end of the
world was at hand.
Yet the most profound and penetrating of the causes that have
transformed society is a medieval inheritance. It was late in
the thirteenth century that the psychology of Conscience was
closely studied for the first time, and men began to speak of it
as the audible voice of God, that never misleads or fails, and
that ought to be obeyed always, whether enlightened or darkened,
right or wrong. The notion was restrained, on its appearance, by
the practice of regarding opposition to Church power as
equivalent to specific heresy, which depressed the secret monitor
below the public and visible authority. With the decline of
coercion the claim of Conscience rose, and the ground abandoned
by the inquisitor was gained by the individual. There was less
reason then for men to be cast of the same type; there was a more
vigorous growth of independent character, and a conscious control
over its formation. The knowledge of good and evil was not an
exclusive and sublime prerogative assigned to states, or nations,
or majorities. When it had been defined and recognised as
something divine in human nature, its action was to limit power
by causing the sovereign voice within to be heard above the
expressed will and settled custom of surrounding men. By that
hypothesis, the soul became more sacred than the state, because
it receives light from above, as well as because its concerns are
eternal, and out of all proportion with the common interests of
government. That is the root from which liberty of Conscience
was developed, and all other liberty needed to confine the
sphere of power, in order that it may not challenge the supremacy
of that which is highest and best in man.
The securities by which this purpose has been attempted compose
the problem of all later history, and centuries were spent in
ascertaining and constructing them. If in the main the direction
has been upward, the movement has been tardy, the conflict
intense, the balance often uncertain. The passion for power over
others can never cease to threaten mankind, and is always sure of
finding new and unforeseen allies in continuing its martyrology.
Therefore, the method of modern progress was revolution. By a
series of violent shocks the nations in succession have struggled
to shake off the Past, to reverse the action of Time and the
verdict of success, and to rescue the world from the reign of the
dead. They have been due less to provocation by actual wrong
than to the attraction of ideal right, and the claims that
inspired them were universal and detached. Progress has imposed
increasing sacrifices on society, on behalf of those who can make
no return, from whose welfare it derives no equivalent benefit,
whose existence is a burden, an evil, eventually a peril to the
community. The mean duration of life, the compendious test of
improvement, is prolonged by all the chief agents of civilisation,
moral and material, religious and scientific, working together,
and depends on preserving, at infinite cost, which is infinite
loss, the crippled child and the victim of accident, the idiot
and the madman, the pauper and the culprit, the old and infirm,
curable and incurable. This growing dominion of disinterested
motive, this liberality towards the weak, in social life,
corresponds to that respect for the minority, in political life,
which is the essence of freedom. It is an application of the
same principle of self-denial, and of the higher law.
Taking long periods, we perceive the advance of moral over
material influence, the triumph of general ideas, the gradual
amendment. The line of march will prove, on the whole, to have
been from force and cruelty to consent and association, to
humanity, rational persuasion, and the persistent appeal to
common, simple, and evident maxims. We have dethroned necessity,
in the shape both of hunger and of fear, by extending the scene
from Western Europe to the whole world, so that all shall
contribute to the treasure of civilisation, and by taking into
partnership in the enjoyment of its rewards those who are far off
as well as those who are below. We shall give our attention to
much that has failed and passed away, as well as to the phenomena
of progress, which help to build up the world in which we live.
For History must be our deliverer not only from the undue
influence of other times, but from the undue influence of our
own, from the tyranny of environment and the pressure of the air
we breathe. It requires all historic forces to produce their
record and submit to judgment, and it promotes the faculty of
resistance to contemporary surroundings by familiarity with other
ages and other orbits of thought.
In these latter days the sum of differences in international
character has been appreciably bound down by the constant process
of adaptation and adjustment, and by exposure to like influences.
The people of various countries are swayed by identical
interests, they are absorbed in the same problems, and thrill
with the same emotions; their classics are interchangeable,
authorities in science are nearly alike for all, and they readily
combine to make experiments and researches in common. Towards
1500, European nations, having been fashioned and composed out of
simple elements during the thousand years between the fall of the
Roman Empire and that of its successor is the East, had reached
full measure of differentiation. They were estranged from each
other, and were inclined to treat the foreigner as the foe.
Ancient links were loosened, the Pope was no longer an accepted
peacemaker; and the idea of an international code, overriding the
will of nations and the authority of sovereigns, had not dawned
upon philosophy. Between the old order that was changing and the
new that was unborn, Europe had an inorganic interval to go
through.
Modern History begins under stress of the Ottoman Conquest.
Constantinople fell, after an attempt to negotiate for help, by
the union of the Greek and Latin Churches. The agreement come to
at Florence was not ratified at home; the attempt was resented,
and led to an explosion of feeling that made even subjugation by
the Turk seem for the moment less intolerable, and that hastened
the catastrophe by making Western Christians slow to sacrifice
themselves for their implacable brethren in the East. Offers of
help were made, conditional on acceptance of the Florentine
decree, and were rejected with patriotic and theological disdain.
A small force of papal and Genoese mercenaries shared the fate of
the defenders, and the end could not have been long averted, even
by the restoration of religious unity. The Powers that held back
were not restrained by dogmatic arguments only. The dread of Latin
intolerance was the most favourable circumstance encountered by the
Turks in the Eastern Empire, and they at once offered protection
and immunities to the patriarch and his prelates. The conquest
of the entire peninsula, with the islands, occupied a generation,
and it was good policy meanwhile to do nothing that would diminish
the advantage or awaken alarm of persecution. Their system required
the increase rather than the conversion of Christian subjects,
for the tribute of gold as well as the tribute of blood. The
Janissaries were selected among the sons of Christian parents,
who became renegades, and who, having neither home nor family,
no life but in camp, no employment but arms, became not only the
best professional soldiers in the world, but a force constantly
active to undo the work of pacific statesmen and to find fresh
occasion for war. There were occasional outbreaks of blind ferocity,
and at all times there was the incapacity of an uncivilised race to
understand the character and the interest of alien subjects more
cultivated than themselves. But there was not at first the sense
of unmitigated tyranny that arose later; and there was not so
great a contrast with life as it was under Italian despots as to
make Christians under the Sultan passionately long for deliverance.
From the perjury of Varna, in 1444, when the Christians broke the
treaty just concluded at Szegedin, it was understood that they
could never be trusted to keep engagements entered into with
people of another religion. It seemed a weak-minded exaggeration
of hypocrisy to abstain from preying on men so furiously divided,
so full of hatred, so incapable of combining in defence of their
altars and their homes, so eager in soliciting aid and intervention
from the infidel in their own disputes. The several principalities
of the circumference, Servia, Bosnia, Wallachia, the Morea, and the
islands, varying in nationality and in religion, were attacked
separately, and made no joint defence. In Epirus, Scanderberg,
once a renegade, then in communion with Rome, drawing his supplies
from the opposite coast of Apulia, which his sentinels on Cape
Linguetta could see at sunrise, maintained himself for many years
victoriously, knowing that his country would perish with him.
John Hunyadi had defended Christendom on the Hungarian frontier
so well that the monarchy of his son stemmed the tide of invasion
for seventy years. While the Turkish outposts kept watch on the
Danube, Mahomet seized Otranto, and all the way upwards to the Alps
there was no force capable of resisting him. Just then, he died,
Otranto was lost, and the enterprise was not renewed. His people
were a nation of soldiers, not a nation of sailors. For operations
beyond sea they relied on the seamen of the AEgean, generally
Christians, as they had required the help of Genoese ships to ferry
them over the Hellespont.
Under Bajazet, the successor, there was some rest for Europe.
His brother, who was a dangerous competitor, as the crown went to
the one who survived, fled for safety to the Christians, and was
detained as a hostage, beyond the possibility of ransom, by the
Knights of St. John, and then by the Pope. The Sultan paid,
that he might be kept quiet.
For years the Turks were busy in the East. Selim conquered Syria
and part of Persia. He conquered Arabia, and was acknowledged by
the Sheriff of Mecca caliph and protector of the holy shrine. He
conquered Egypt and assumed the prerogative of the Imaum, which
had been a shadow at Cairo, but became, at Constantinople, the
supreme authority in Islam. Gathering up the concentrated
resources of the Levant, Solyman the Magnificent turned, at last,
against the enemy who guarded the gates of civilised Europe.
Having taken Belgrade, he undertook, in 1526, the crowning
campaign of Turkish history. At the battle of Mohacs Hungary
lost her independence. The Turks found a Transylvanian magnate
who was willing to receive the crown from them; and the broad
valley of the Danube continued to be their battlefield until the
days of Sobieski and Eugene. But the legitimate heir of King
Ladislas, who fell at Mohacs, was Ferdinand, only brother of
Charles V; and Hungary, with the vast region then belonging to
the Bohemian crown, passing to the same hands as the ancient
inheritance of the Habsburgs, constituted the great Austrian
monarchy which extended from the Adriatic to the far Sarmatian
plain, and Solyman's victory brought him face to face with the
first Power able to arrest his progress. The Turks were repulsed
at Vienna in 1529, at Malta in 1564. This was their limit in
Western Europe; and after Lepanto, in 1571, their only expansion
was at the expense of Poland and Muscovy. They still wielded
almost boundless resources; the entire seaboard from Cattaro all
round by the Euxine to the Atlantic was Mahomedan, and all but
one-fourth of the Mediterranean was a Turkish lake. It was long
before they knew that it was not their destiny to be masters of
the Western as well as of the Eastern world.
While this heavy cloud overhung the Adriatic and the Danube, and
the countries within reach of the Turk were in peril of
extinction, the nations farther west were consolidating rapidly
into unity and power. By the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella,
by their conquest of Granada and the rise of a new hemisphere at
their command, Spain for the first time became a great Power;
while France, having expelled the English, having instituted a
permanent army, acquired vast frontier provinces, and crushed the
centrifugal forces of feudalism, was more directly formidable and
more easily aggressive. These newly created Powers portended
danger in one direction. Their increase was not so much in
comparison with England or with Portugal, as in contrast with
Italy. England, through the Tudors, had achieved internal
tranquillity; and Portugal was already at the head of Europe in
making the ocean tributary to trade. But Italy was divided,
unwarlike, poor in the civic virtues that made Switzerland
impregnable, rich in the tempting luxuries of civilisation, an
inexhaustible treasure-house of much that the neighbours greatly
needed and could never find elsewhere. The best writers and
scholars and teachers, the most consummate artists, the ablest
commanders by land and sea, the deepest explorers of the mystery
of State that have been known before or since, all the splendours
of the Renaissance, and the fruits of a whole century of progress
were there, ready to be appropriated and employed for its own
benefit by a paramount Power.
It was obvious that the countries newly strengthened, the
countries growing in unity and concentration and superfluous
forces, would encroach upon those that were demoralised and
weakened. By strict reason of State, this was not the policy of
France; for the French frontiers were assigned by nature
everywhere but in the north-east. There the country was open,
the enemy's territory approached the capital; and the true line
of expansion was towards Antwerp, or Liege, or Strasburg. But
the French were invited into Italy with promise of welcome,
because the Angevin claim to Naples, defeated in 1462, had passed
to the King of France. The Aragonese, who had been successful in
resisting it, was not legitimate, and had been compelled again to
struggle for existence by the Rising of the Barons. The rising was
suppressed; the discontented Neapolitans went into exile; and they
were now in France, prophesying easy triumphs if Charles VIII
would extend his hand to take the greatness that belonged to the
heir of the house of Anjou. They were followed by the most
important of the Italian Cardinals, Della Rovere, nephew of a
former Pope, himself afterwards the most famous pontiff who had
appeared for centuries. Armed with the secrets of the Conclave,
the Cardinal insisted that Alexander VI should be deposed, on the
ground that he had paid for the papacy in ascertainable sums of
money and money's worth; whereas spiritual office obtained in
that way was ipso facto void.
The advent of the French, heralded by the passionate eloquence of
Savonarola, was also hailed by Florence and its dependencies, in
their impatience of the Medicean rule, now that it had dropped
from the hands of the illustrious Lorenzo into those of his less
competent son. Lodovico Sforza, the Regent of Milan, was also
among those who called in the French, as he had a family
quarrel with Naples. His father, Francesco, the most successful
of the Condottieri, who acquired the Milanese by marriage with a
Visconti, is known by that significant saying: "May God defend me
from my friends. From my enemies I can defend myself." As the
Duke of Orleans also descended from the Visconti, Lodovico wished
to divert the French to the more alluring prospect of Naples.
In September 1494 Charles VIII invaded Italy by the Mont Genevre,
with an army equal to his immediate purpose. His horsemen still
displayed the medieval armour, wrought by the artistic craftsmen
of the Renaissance. They were followed by artillery, the newer
arm which, in another generation, swept the steel-clad knight
away. French infantry was not thought so well of. But the Swiss
had become, in their wars with Burgundy, the most renowned of all
foot-soldiers. They were unskilled in manoeuvres; but their
pikemen, charging in dense masses, proved irresistible on many
Italian fields; until it was discovered that they would serve for
money on either side, and that when opposed to their countrymen
they refused to fight. At Pavia they were cut down by the
Spaniards and their fame began to wane. They were Germans,
hating Austria, and their fidelity to the golden lilies is one of
the constant facts of French history, until the Swiss guard and
the white flag vanished together, in July 1830.
Charles reached Naples early in 1495, having had no resistance to
overcome, but having accomplished nothing, and having manifested
no distinct purpose on his way, when he found himself, for a
moment, master of Florence and of Rome. The deliverance of
Constantinople was an idea that occurred inevitably to a man of
enterprise who was in possession of Southern Italy. It was the
advanced post of Europe against the East, of Christendom against
Islam; the proper rendezvous of Crusaders; the source of
supplies; the refuge of squadrons needing to refit. The Sultan
was not an overwhelming warrior, like his father; he had not,
like Selim, his successor, control of the entire East, and he was
held in check by the existence of his brother, whom Charles took
with him, on leaving Rome, with a view to ulterior service, but
whom he lost soon after.
Charles VIII was not a man ripened by experience of great
affairs, and he had assumed the title of King of Jerusalem, as a
sign of his crusading purpose. But he also called himself King
of Sicily, as representing the Anjous, and this was not a disused
and neglected derelict. For the island belonged to the King of
Aragon, the most politic and capable of European monarchs.
Before starting for Italy, Charles had made terms with him, and
Ferdinand, in consideration of a rectified frontier, had engaged,
by the Treaty of Barcelona, to take no unfriendly advantage of
his neighbour's absence. The basis of this agreement was
shattered by the immediate unexpected and overwhelming success of
the French arms. From his stronghold in the South it would be
easy for Charles to make himself master of Rome, of Florence, of
all Italy, until he came in sight of the lion of St. Mark. So
vast and sudden a superiority was a serious danger. A latent
jealousy of Spain underlay the whole expedition. The realm of
the Catholic kings was expanding, and an indistinct empire,
larger, in reality, than that of Rome, was rising out of the
Atlantic. By a very simple calculation of approaching contingencies,
Ferdinand might be suspected of designs upon Naples. Now that
the helplessness of the Neapolitans had been revealed, it was
apparent that he had made a false reckoning when he allowed the
French to occupy what he might have taken more easily himself,
by crossing the Straits of Messina. Ferdinand joined the Italians
of the North in declaring against the invader, and his envoy
Fonseca tore up the Treaty of Barcelona before the face of the
French king.
Having been crowned in the Cathedral, and having garrisoned his
fortresses, Charles set out for France, at the head of a small
army. As he came over the Apennines into Lombardy, at Fornovo he
was met by a larger force, chiefly provided by Venice, and had to
fight his way through. A fortnight after his departure, the
Spaniards, under Gonsalvo of Cordova, landed in Calabria, as
auxiliaries of the dethroned king. The throne was once more
occupied by the fallen family, and Charles retained nothing of
his easy and inglorious conquests when he died in 1498.
His successor, Lewis XII, was the Duke of Orleans, who descended
from the Visconti, and he at once prepared to enforce his claim
on Milan. He allied himself against his rival, Sforza, with Venice,
and with Pope Alexander. That he might marry the widowed queen,
and preserve her duchy of Brittany for the Crown, he required
that his own childless marriage should be annulled. Upon the
Legate who brought the necessary documents the grateful king
bestowed a principality, a bride of almost royal rank, and an
army wherewith to reconquer the lost possessions of the Church in
Central Italy. For the Legate was the Cardinal of Valencia, who
became thenceforward Duke of Valentinois, and is better known as
Caesar Borgia. The rich Lombard plain, the garden of Italy, was
conquered as easily as Naples had been in the first expedition.
Sforza said to the Venetians: "I have been the dinner; you will
be the supper"; and went up into the Alps to look for Swiss
levies. At Novara, in 1500, his mercenaries betrayed him and he
ended his days in a French prison. On their way home from the
scene of their treachery, the Swiss crowned their evil repute by
seizing Bellinzona and the valley of the Ticino, which has
remained one of their cantons.
Lewis, undisputed master of Milan and Genoa, assured of the Roman
and the Venetian alliance, was in a better position than his
predecessor to renew the claim on the throne of Naples. But now,
behind Frederic of Naples, there was Ferdinand of Aragon and
Sicily, who was not likely to allow the king for whom he had
fought to be deposed without resistance. Therefore it was a
welcome suggestion when Ferdinand proposed that they should
combine to expel Frederic and to divide his kingdom. As it was
Ferdinand who had just reinstated him, this was an adaptation to
the affairs of Christendom of the methods which passed for
justice in the treatment of unbelievers, and were applied without
scruple by the foremost men of the age, Albuquerque and Cortez.
Frederic turned for aid to the Sultan, and this felonious act was
put forward as the justification of his aggressors. The Pope
sanctioned the Treaty of Partition, and as the Crown of Naples
was technically in his gift, he deprived the king on the ground
stated by the allies. The exquisite significance of the plea was
that the Pope himself had invited Turkish intervention in Italy,
and now declared it a cause of forfeiture. In 1501 French and
Spaniards occupied their allotted portions, and then quarrelled
over the distribution of the spoil. For a time Gonsalvo, "the
great Captain," was driven to bay at Barletta on the Adriatic;
but at the end of 1503 he won a decisive victory, and the
defeated French, under Bayard, withdrew from the Garigliano to
the Po. Naples remained a dependency of Spain, for all purposes,
in modern history.
In the midst of foreign armies, and of new combinations disturbing the
established balance of Italian Powers, the lesser potentates were
exposed to destruction; and there were forces about sufficient, under
capable guidance, to remodel the chaotic centre of Italy, where no
strong government had ever been constituted. Caesar Borgia recognised
the opportunity as soon as the French were at Milan; the Pope was
growing old and was clay in his terrible hands. His sister just then
became Duchess of Ferrara, on the border of the defenceless region
which he coveted; and the dominions of the King of France, his patron
and ally, extended to the Adda and the Po. Never had such advantages
been united in such a man. For Caesar's talents were of the imperial
kind. He was fearless of difficulties, of dangers, and of
consequences; and having no preference for right or wrong, he weighed
with an equal and dispassionate mind whether it was better to spare a
man or to cut his throat. As he did not attempt more than he could
perform, his rapid success awakened aspirations for a possible future.
He was odious to Venice, but a Venetian, who watched his meteoric
course, wonders, in his secret diary, whether this unerring schemer
was to be the appointed deliverer. He was a terror to Florence, yet
the Florentine secretary, to whom he confided his thoughts in certain
critical hours, wrote of him as men have written of Napoleon, and
erected a monument to his memory that has secretly fascinated half the
politicians in the world.
With his double equipment as a lieutenant of the French king and as a
condottiere of the Pope, he began by reviving the dormant authority of
Rome, where nominal feudatories held vicarious sway. In the place of
many despots struggling not for objects of policy, but for their own
existence, there appeared a single state, reaching from sea to sea,
from the Campagna to the salt-marshes by the delta of the Po, under a
papal prince and gonfaloniere, invested with rights and prerogatives
to protect the Holy See, and with power to control it. Rome would
have become a dependency of the reigning house of Borgia, as it had
been of less capable vassals, and the system might have lasted as long
as the brain that devised it. Lorenzo de' Medici once said that his
buildings were the only works that would outlast him; and it is common
in the secular characters of that epoch, unlike the priesthood, not to
believe in those things that are abiding, and not to regard
organisations that are humble and obscure at first and bloom by slow
degrees for the use of another age.
Caesar's enterprise was not determined or limited by the claims of the
Vatican. He served both Pope and king, and his French alliance
carried farther than the recovery of the Romagna. Florence became
tributary by taking him into pay. Bologna bought him off with a heavy
ransom. Venice inscribed his name in the illustrious record of its
nobility. None could tell where his ambition or his resources would
end, how his inventive genius would employ the rivalry of the
invaders, what uses he would devise for the Emperor and the Turk. The
era of petty tyranny was closed by the apparition of one superior
national tyrant, who could be no worse than twenty, for though his
crimes would be as theirs, they would not be useless to the nation,
but were thoughtfully designed and executed for the sake of power, the
accepted object of politics in a country where the right was known by
the result. Caesar was not an unpopular master, and his subjects were
true to him in his falling fortunes. The death of Alexander and the
decline of the French cause in the South cut short his work in the
autumn of 1503. Della Rovere, Cardinal Vincula, whose title came from
the Church of St. Peter in Chains, the inflexible enemy of the
Borgias, was now Julius II; and after a brief interval he was strong
enough to drive Caesar out of the country; while the Venetians,
entering the Romagna under ill omens for the Republic, occupied the
remnant of his many conquests.
Julius had resisted Alexander, as a man unfit for his function, and it
soon appeared that this was not a private feud, but a total reversal
of ideas and policy. The change was not felt in religious reform or
in patronage of learning, but first in the notion of territorial
politics. Caesar had rebuilt the duchy of Romagna in the service of
the papacy; and it was the essence of the schemes of Julius that it
should be secured for the Holy See, together with all else that could
be claimed by right, or acquired by policy and war. The Borgias had
prevailed by arms, and Julius would not consent to be their inferior
and to condemn his whole career. He must draw the sword; but, unlike
them, he would draw it in the direct interest of the Church. He had
overthrown the conqueror, not that the conquests might be dissolved,
or might go to Venice, but in order that he himself and his successors
might have power in Italy, and through Italians, over the world. Upon
this foundation he instituted the temporal power, as it subsisted for
three centuries. The jealous municipal spirit of the Middle Ages had
dissolved society into units, and nothing but force could reverse the
tradition and weld the fragments into great communities. Borgia had
shown that this could be done; but also that no victorious
condottiere, were he even his own son, could be trusted by a Pope.
Julius undertook to command his army himself, and to fight at the head
of his troops. Letting his white beard grow, putting on armour, and
proudly riding his war-horse under fire, he exhibited the most
picturesque and romantic figure of his time.
The Venetians, commanding the seaboard with their galleys, were not
easy to dislodge from the towns they occupied. Essentially a maritime
and commercial Power, their centre of gravity lay so far east that it
was once proposed to move the capital from the Lagoons to the
Bosphorus. When the advancing Turk damaged their trade and threatened
their Colonial empire, they took advantage of Italian disintegration
to become a continental state, and the general insecurity and
oppression of miniature potentates made it a happy fate to be subject
to the serene and politic government, whose 3000 ships still held the
sea, flying the Christian flag. Renouncing non-intervention on the
mainland, they set power above prosperity, and the interest of the
State above the welfare and safety of a thousand patrician houses.
Wherever there were troubled waters, the fisher was Venice. All down
the Eastern coast, and along the Alpine slopes to the passes which
were the trade route to Northern Europe, and still farther, at the
expense of Milan and Naples, the patriarch of Aquileia and the Duke of
Ferrara, the Emperor and the Pope, the Queen of the Adriatic extended
her intelligent sway. It was under the long administration of the
Doge Foscari, Byron's hero, that it dawned upon the Venetians that it
might be their mission to supersede the frail and helpless governments
of the Peninsula; and their famous politician and historian, Paruta,
believed that it was in their power to do what Rome had done. Their
ambition was evident to their neighbours, and those whom they had
despoiled, under every plausible pretext, awaited the opportunity of
retribution.
Julius, taking counsel with Machiavelli, found it easy to form a
league composed of their enemies. As it was not the interest of the
empire, France and Spain, to spite Venice by strengthening each other,
the Venetians imagined they could safely hold their ground, leaving
the dependent cities to make their own terms with the enemy. Padua
held out victoriously against Maximilian, but the battle of Agnadello
was lost against the French in the same year 1509, in which, fighting
under the Crescent in the Indian Ocean, the Venetians were defeated by
the Portuguese, and lost their Eastern trade. They soon obtained
their revenge. Having gained his ends by employing France against
Venice in the League of Cambray, Julius now allied himself with the
Venetians to expel the French from Milan. He had recovered the papal
possessions, he had broken the Venetian power, and in this his third
effort to reconstitute Italy, he still succeeded, because he had the
support of the Venetians and the Swiss. The French gave battle to the
Spaniards at Ravenna and to the Swiss at Novara, and then they
evacuated the Milanese.
Lewis XII swore that he would wreak vengeance on the papacy, and, in
conjunction with the Emperor, opened a Council at Pisa, which was
attended by a minority of cardinals. Julius met the attack by calling
a general Council to meet at the Lateran, which was the first since
the great reforming Council, and was still sitting when Julius died in
1513. Like the Council at Pisa, it was regarded at Rome as a move in
the great game of Politics, and it made no serious attempt to heal the
longstanding and acknowledged wounds of the Church. Its action spread
the belief that the reigning diseases were known, but that the remedy
was refused, and that reforms that might help religion were not to be
expected from Church or State. Julius II died without having expelled
the barbarians, as he had promised. The French were gone, but the
Spaniards remained unshaken, and were still the pivot of the
operations of the Holy See. The investiture of Naples was granted to
Ferdinand of Aragon, and the fairest region in Europe bound Spain
irrevocably to the Popes.
Although the Italian scheme of Julius was left half-way, his Roman
scheme was completed; the intermittent suzerainty of the Middle Ages
was straightened out into effective sovereignty over the half of
Central Italy, where anarchy used to reign, and the temporal power was
fixed on foundations solid enough to bear the coming diminution of
spiritual power. The added splendours of modern royalty, round which
cardinals of reigning houses--Medici, Este, Famese, Gonzaga--displayed
the pomp and ceremony of semi-regal state, in palaces built by
Bramante and Michael Angelo, with the ambassadors and protectors of
the Powers, and the heads of princely families that had worn the
tiara, made Rome the magnetic pole of aristocratic society. As the
capital of an absolute monarchy, as others were, it became associated
with principles which, in the Middle Ages, it resisted with spiritual
and secular weapons; and the magnitude of the change was apparent when
Leo X, by the Concordat of Bologna, conceded to Francis I the choice
of bishops and the higher patronage of the Church of France. For
Francis on his accession sent an army into Italy, the last work of
Julius II was overthrown at Marignano, and France again was master of
the Milanese.
The final struggle was to come at the vacancy of the Imperial throne.
Ferdinand of Aragon was dead, and Naples passed to the King of
undivided Spain. It was the unswerving policy of Rome that it should
not be united with the Empire, and against that fixed axiom the
strongest dynasty of emperors went to pieces. The Reformation had
just begun in Germany, and Leo wished one of the Northern Electors to
be chosen as Maximilian's successor. In conformity with the political
situation, he would have preferred Frederic of Saxony, the protector
of Luther. The election of Charles, in 1519, was a defiance of the
Balance of Power, a thing not to the taste of the Middle Ages, but
becoming familiar in those days. France, unable formerly to keep
Naples against Spain, had now to defend Lombardy against Spain,
supported by Germany, Naples, and the Netherlands. Francis maintained
the unequal struggle for four years, although his most powerful
vassal, Bourbon, brought the enemy to the gates of Marseilles. The
decisive action of the long Italian war was fought at Pavia in June
1525, where Francis was taken prisoner, and was compelled to purchase
his release by cruel sacrifices.
The years that followed are only a phase in the permanent subjugation
of Italy, but they are memorable in another connection. For the
triumph of Pavia brought the suppression of the Lutherans within the
range of practical politics. The Peasants' War had damaged their
position; the Emperor was able now to execute the Imperial decree of
Worms, and there were some in Germany who desired it. He made it a
condition of his prisoner's deliverance that he should assist in
destroying them; and Francis readily offered to do it by coming in
person, and bearing half the charge. Charles proposed to take him at
his word, when he learnt that the Pope was at the head of a great
alliance against him. Pope Clement was advised by the best
ecclesiastic in his court, the Datario Giberti, to try one more
struggle before the chains were riveted, and before he became, as they
said, a Spanish chaplain. It is a war, said Giberti, not for power or
dominion, but for the redemption of Italy from perpetual bondage; and
he placed his master, for the moment, at the head of the nation.
Clement concluded a treaty with the Emperor's enemies at Cognac,
released Francis from his oath to observe the Treaty of Madrid, and
endeavoured to make Pescara, the victor of Pavia, turn traitor by the
prospect of the throne of Naples.
In this way Charles was compelled to turn his arms against Rome. He
protested that he would risk all his crowns for the sake of revenge,
and appealed to Germany, with its Lutherans, for support. Tell them,
he wrote, that they are wanted against the Turk. They will know what
Turk we mean. They knew it so well that the landsknechts came
provided with silken nooses for the necks of cardinals, besides a
gold-thread one for the Pope. He issued a detailed manifesto against
him, the work of Valdes, one of the rare Lutherans of Spain; and those
who were in the secret expected that the shrift would be short.
Francis had intended from the first moment to break his word, and to
execute no conditions injurious to France, but he came too late. A
large body of Germans poured over the Alps and joined the Spaniards in
Lombardy. It was observed afterwards that the Spaniards were the most
vindictive, but it was the Germans who made the push for Rome; and
Bourbon, on the plea of economy, as he could not pay them, led them
through the passes of the Apennines, overthrowing the Medici at
Florence on the way. Rome was taken almost without resistance, and
Clement shut himself up in St. Angelo, while the city was given over
to unmerciful pillage, the prelates were held to ransom, and all the
secret treasure was got at by torture. That month of May 1527, with
its awful experience, was an end to the pride and the hope and the
gladness of the pagan revival; a severe and penitential spirit came
over society, preparing to meet the Reformation by reform, and to
avert change in doctrine by a change in morality. The sack of Rome,
said Cardinal Cajetan, was a just judgment on the sufferers. The city
was now the Emperor's, by right of conquest, to bestow as he chose,
and the Romans were not unwilling that it should be his capital. Some
said that the abolition of the temporal power would secure peace among
the Powers, whilst others thought that the consequence would be a
patriarch in France, if not in England as well. The last effort of
the French being spent, and Doria having gone over to the Emperor,
taking with him Genoa, the key of French influence, the chain of
transactions which began with the Neapolitan expedition of 1494,
concluded in 1530 with the siege of Florence. Charles made peace with
France at Cambray, and with the Pope at Barcelona, and received the
imperial crown at Bologna.
This was the consummation of the Italian wars, by which the main
conditions of modern politics were determined. The conflicts which
had lasted for a generation, and the disorder and violence which were
older still, were at an end; Italy obtained repose from her master,
and spent for centuries her intellect in his service. Pescara,
Ferrante, Gonzaga, Philibert Emanuel, Spinola, were the men who made
Spain the first of military powers. And Parma's invincible legions,
which created Belgium, wrested Antwerp from the Dutch, delivered Paris
from Henry IV, and watched the signals of the Armada that they might
subdue England, were thronged with Italian infantry. Excepting
Venice, strong in her navy and her unapproachable lagoon, Spain
dominated thenceforward over Italy, and became, by her ascendency in
both Sicilies, a bulwark against the Turks.
Italy passed out of general politics, and was a force in Europe only
through Rome. The Conclave, and the creation of cardinals to compose
the Conclave, made it a constant school of negotiation and intrigue
for the best diplomacy in the world. By favour of the Habsburgs, the
papacy obtained a fixed dominion, secure against all comers, requiring
no military defence, no wasting and profitless expenditure, nothing to
dissolve the mirage of an ideal government, under spiritual and
converted men. The pontificates became steadily longer, averaging six
years in the sixteenth century, eight in the seventeenth, twelve in
the eighteenth, sixteen in the nineteenth, and by the original and
characteristic institution which is technically known as nepotism, the
selection of a Prime Minister, not from the College of the
ecclesiastical aristocracy, but from the family of the reigning
sovereign, the tonsured statesmen introduced a dynastic infusion into
the fluctuations of elective monarchy.
The triumph and coronation of the Emperor Charles V, when he was
superior to all that Europe had beheld since Charlemagne, revived the
ancient belief in a supreme authority elevated on alliance with the
priesthood, at the expense of the independence and the equipoise of
nations. The exploits of Magellan and Cortez, upsetting all habits of
perspective, called up vain dreams of the coming immensity of Spain,
and roused the phantom of universal empire. The motive of domination
became a reigning force in Europe; for it was an idea which monarchy
would not willingly let fall after it had received a religious and an
international consecration. For centuries it was constantly asserted
as a claim of necessity and of right. It was the supreme
manifestation of the modern state according to the image which
Machiavelli had set up, the state that suffers neither limit nor
equality, and is bound by no duty to nations or to men, that thrives
on destruction, and sanctifies whatever things contributed to increase
of power.
This law of the modern world, that power tends to expand indefinitely,
and will transcend all barriers, abroad and at home, until met by
superior forces, produces the rhythmic movement of History. Neither
race, nor religion, nor political theory has been in the same degree
an incentive to the perpetuation of universal enmity and national
strife. The threatened interests were compelled to unite for the
self-government of nations, the toleration of religions, and the
rights of men. And it is by the combined efforts of the weak, made
under compulsion, to resist the reign of force and constant wrong,
that, in the rapid change but slow progress of four hundred years,
liberty has been preserved, and secured, and extended, and finally
understood.